Kyle McDonald, a programmer and artist based in Los Angeles, has developed a website that tracks the movements of private planes and assigns them an “urgency level.” The project, called Apocalypse Early Warning Systemassumes that if a major catastrophe were brewing, the billionaires could be informed before the rest of the population and therefore rush to their respective bunkers aboard their jet.
Kyle McDonald returned to the origin of this surveillance system in an article for Business Insider. The idea arose after a threat from President Donald Trump regarding Iran, in which he claimed that“an entire civilization” would die if a ceasefire agreement was not reached. This statement pushed Kyle McDonald to think about the flow of information, who holds it, who controls it and who still deserves our trust in a context of growing mistrust.
The system relies on a global network of radio receivers that pick up signals emitted by aircraft, revealing their position, altitude, trajectory and identifiers. The data is then filtered to retain only private jets and charters, then compared to an expected number of flights, based on several years of history.
Using data to track individuals
The model takes into account daily and weekly variations and peaks linked to holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year. Level 5 – the highest – corresponds to activity greater than that observed over the last twelve months. The largest peak has so far been recorded on April 6, when the project was launched, although there was nothing to suggest that the end of the world was near on that date.
A committed artist, Kyle McDonald has already worked on projects aimed at revealing surveillance and control mechanisms, which is what interests him here: questioning the available data and the ability for anyone with access to it to track individuals. During protests over the death of George Floyd in 2020 in Los Angeles, he helped create an app that allowed protesters to track police activity, including using air traffic data from police helicopters – some of which masked their identities.
Kyle McDonald now works as a freelancer, running an art studio and consulting company. Half of his income comes from technical and creative consulting assignments for technology companies and artists, while the other half comes from exhibitions, mainly in Europe and East Asia.
Monitoring the private jets of billionaires has become an additional source of income: around 2,488 people are registered, some choosing the paid option of 5 dollars (4.30 euros) per year to receive alerts by e-mail or SMS. The price to pay to know if you need to run to the cellar urgently.
